Portable computing devices are increasingly subject to the two opposing requirements of longer operation times from power sources of limited capacity (e.g., batteries) and greater utility through storage capabilities providing higher capacities and faster access. In response, manufacturers of portable computing devices continue to employ ever newer power and storage technologies, along with continuing improvements thereto, in an effort to provide computing devices that store ever increasing amounts of data in a manner that is ever more quickly accessible while also providing longer operation times.
Efforts to answer these conflicting requirements have resulted in forays into various data storage technologies, including solid state storage technologies such as FLASH. Unfortunately, although such solid state technologies do provide faster storage access while also consuming far less power than ferromagnetic hard drives, concerns remain over the limited lifespans of storage cells within. Thus, hard drives remain a desirable storage technology for use in a wide variety of applications.
With this continuing desirability of hard drives, various efforts have been made to reduce their power consumption, particularly of the motors they employ to rotate the ferromagnetic platter media on which data is magnetically stored. One ongoing approach has been to rely on increasing data storage densities to allow their platter media to be made ever smaller such that less energy is required to rotate their platter media. However, despite considerable strides in such reductions in the physical sizes of hard drives, the fact that they continue to employ media of whatever size or shape that must be rotated by an electric motor has limited the degree of reduction in power consumption that can be achieved in this way.
Another approach has long been turning off the motors of hard disk drives and allowing the platter media to cease to rotate when little or no access to store or retrieve data has occurred within a recent time period and/or is expected to occur. While this entirely eliminates the consumption of electric power by those motors while they remain turned off, this imposes a momentary, but significant increase in power consumption whenever those motors must be turned on again to spin up the platter media back to normal rotational speeds, thereby also imposing a delay in any access to the stored data arising from having to wait until the platters are fully spun up to normal rotational speeds. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the embodiments described herein are needed.